Buffy Season One Episode Eleven

If you ever find yourself in a high school that has a lot of vampire and demon action, stay away from locker rooms. They are not safe.

This is the invisible girl episode ("Out of Mind, Out of Sight"). Kind of obvious with its points; e.g., Xander and Willow still have a long, rich history together, common experience from grade school on, etc., and in drawing on it they casually leave Buffy out. This of course foreshadows what we're to learn about poor Marcie, her feeling left out of Cordelia's crew. The show prepares us to think it'll be a weepy, the poor girl to be brought home through Buffy's empathy and sensitivity, parallel to how the little league boy was brought back in the previous episode. But instead the script twists the episode into something else.

FBI agents show up at the end. This may set up something interesting for the future, but in the context of this episode they're bullshit.

At the end, at the invisible person training school, the chapter the class is reading in the textbook consists of the lyrics to "Happiness Is A Warm Gun." So what?

Boxed-in

Simon Johnson (What Would Gorbachev Say? On The US, China, And Saudi Arabia): If we continue to depend on "cheap enough" oil, that's dangerous enough in geopolitical terms. But if we run our economy so we finance our oil imports by borrowing heavily from the outside world (not all from China; the Middle East and Japan are also big providers of net savings), we are asking for trouble.

(I don't pretend to understand the issues here, but Johnson is saying that Obama and Geithner are setting exactly the wrong pattern for the future, and are doing it to support a status quo that will prevent us from getting out from under our problems. This type of argument isn't surprising from Johnson, who says that if some banks are too big to fail, then those banks shouldn't have existed in the first place, and we should act to prevent them from existing in the future.)